Top 5 Tips to get Your Home Ready for Sale
Getting ready to sell your home can be overwhelming. We partner with several amazing realtors in Edmonton to offer their clients a 1-hour consultation in which we provide you with tips and recommendations for getting your home ready to show. We’ve seen a lot of homes and given a lot of recommendations, and these are the top 5 tips we almost always include.
De-Personalize your Home
Your kids are adorable, so is that great photo of your dog and I’m totally down for you showcasing your unique personality. However, when it comes time to selling your home, those things need to go. We’re not trying to make your home feel boring or sterile, but we are trying to give potential buyers that freedom to envision their own unique personality in their future home. So swap out the family photos with a nice landscape print. Tuck away any books that could possibly be seen as offensive.
And while this can sometimes be a more sensitive topic, we also recommend removing any religious art, idols, etc. from your home. Again, we want buyers to be able to envision themselves in the space and that can be hard to do if they happen to be of a different religion from you. The same thing goes for urns or other very personal tokens.
We also recommend this for security and privacy reasons too. A lot of times those special, unique-to-us items are valuable and we don’t want to risk anything happening to them. This also goes for your home office, where you want to ensure that any important documents or work information is put away for showings. We recommend keeping the identities of the kids in the home as private as possible too (including taking down their name from their door, their birth chart information, and other similar items).
Match your Light Bulbs
We’ve been there, purchasing bulbs to replace the one that burnt out, not remembering if it’s soft white or warm white or daylight, and realizing it’s the wrong one when we install it. Because it feels like too much of a hassle to change, we can deal with the fact that it doesn’t match, and it gets left as is.
Trust me, if this is you, you are not alone (we see this in almost all of the homes we do consults in).
Ensuring your bulbs match in colour temperature is important for a few reasons. Even though we might be fine living with it in our own homes, buyers are looking at your space with a critical eye. And a bulb that doesn’t match gets added to their mental “to-do” list. The bigger that mental to-do list gets, the less interested they become in the property (or the lower the price they want to pay to accommodate the cost of that to-do list). It also makes the photos of your home look off as it will cast different colours in the same space. So invest in some matching bulbs.
Extra tip: my favourite colour temperature is 3500K - it’s not always easy to find (although here’s a set on Amazon) so you might have to go with 3000K.
Touch-Ups, Repairs and Cleaning
It’s annoying work to do, but it pays off in the end. Grab a roll of painters tape and walk through your house. Put a piece of tape everywhere you see a scuff or a nick or a scratch. Then, work away at fixing it. Touch up those doors, the trim, the walls, the floors and even your ceiling. Repair the blind that’s out of whack and replace the light fixture that isn’t working. It goes a long way to making your home look taken care of and loved. When potential buyers see a home with scuffs, nicks and scratches, it makes them wonder, what else hasn’t been taken care of?
Cleaning is also incredibly important. And I don’t just mean a light dusting. I’m talking about having the carpets cleaned, washing walls, and cleaning your oven so it’s spotless (among many other items). It keeps the buyers focused on the home and its possibilities instead of distracting them with dirt and grime. I highly recommend grabbing a copy of Go Clean Co’s Handbooks if you want to DIY the cleaning or hire a reputable cleaning service if you aren’t able to take it on yourself. It is truly incredible what a good clean can do to give a home a new life.
Have a “Go Bin”
Along with depersonalizing our decor, we also need to depersonalize our bathrooms. The Go Bin is what I call any sort of container where you can easily toss in your day to day products (shampoo, soap, toothpaste, etc.) so that they can be tucked away for showings (and for the day your home is photographed too). Even though we all need to use these products, it can feel a bit awkward and personal to be checking out the bathroom in a potential home and see all the items the current owners use. Again, we want buyers to be picturing themselves in the space, not focused on what type of shampoo you use in the morning!
This same principle applies to your bedside tables. Tuck away your hand lotion, the box of tissues and any other personal items. Lastly, put the toilet seats and lids down, and empty those garbages!
Add some (Faux) Life
Once you’ve tidied, cleaned, de-personalized and used your go-bin, sometimes spaces can feel a bit uninviting. We love popping in a little faux plant here and there to add some life to a space.
This doesn’t have to mean going out and buying items you won’t use again though! Ask a friend to borrow a few while your house is for sale, or have your home staged professionally (yep - we can also help you with that!).
Seriously, you would be surprised how many faux plants we add to the average house during staging. We always think we have too many and then we get in to stage and realize we could have used more!
If you’re getting ready to sell your home and want a personalized checklist for your space, please send us an inquiry for a Pre-Sale Consultation. In addition to the 1 hour walkthrough with you, we also summarize our recommendations in a beautiful pdf document which is emailed to you after the consultation to refer to. We can also recommend other updates that may be beneficial to increasing your resale value and are able to do partial and full staging for your home.